


Contrasting Colors

by starboydjh



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Artist AU, Colorblindness, Fluff, M/M, artist, colorblind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 21:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14723879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starboydjh/pseuds/starboydjh
Summary: Phil’s colorblind and his boyfriend Dan’s an artist. When Dan suggests Phil helps him out with a painting, Phil’s more than a bit skeptical.





	Contrasting Colors

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired in part by the song Contrasting Colors by Speak Low If You Speak Love.

Phil never really thought much about being colorblind. He learned his “colors” in primary school as shades of muted grey, and he could vaguely tell what shade was what well enough to dress himself each morning and learn when to stop and when to go while his father taught him to drive. Never once did he think he was missing out on anything by being colorblind, until he met a quirky artist online with a weird sense of humor and a serious talent. 

Phil had been making videos on YouTube for a year or so when someone under the name “danisnotonfire” began commenting on his videos and replying to his tweets. When he’d clicked through Dan’s photos on Dailybooth and saw how gorgeous he was, he knew he needed to send Dan a message. After a few weeks of constant texting, Skyping after Dan had gotten home from school, and spending a good majority of that time on Skype watching Dan paint, Dan finally booked a ticket to go visit Phil in Manchester for the weekend while his parents were away. 

Dan was just as beautiful as his paintings, and in a way, abstract like them too. Dan was a mix of the oddest things, and Phil found over the start of their relationship that he was always discovering something new about Dan. Around every corner of his personality, in every aspect of who Dan was, Phil found Dan to be absolutely fascinating. His favorite thing to do, he learned, was watch Dan walk around the specialty art store near Dan’s house in Wokingham. He’d stand a few paces behind Dan and watch him mull over the tubes of paint, and laugh when Dan would pick up the brushes with long handles on them and run the bristles over his cheek gently. Dan would spend hours picking over tubes of paint if Phil would let him. When they went to the art store together, that was one of the few moments that Phil thought of what he could be missing for Dan to want to pick over colors with such care. There must have been something incredibly special in those little metal tubes. 

Dan liked to paint sat on the floor of his parents’ basement that had been turned into something of a studio for Dan to use. There were cups of water everywhere, brushes laid out on bamboo brush rollers (because Dan insisted that they dried better when they were all laid out on the rollers instead of rolled up), tarp covering the carpet in one corner of the room and Tupperware containers of colors Dan had mixed up that he didn’t want to dry out. Phil loved to watch him do what he did best, and fell in love with Dan all over again when he watched him paint. Dan saw the world in such an incredible way to be able to put it on a canvas like that. 

When they moved in together, Dan insisted they find a flat with two bedrooms so he could have a studio room. Phil wasn’t going to concede on it, even if it meant looking at flats out of their price range. The only place they could find that they both agreed on had carpet all throughout, and Dan promised Phil that he wouldn’t stain the carpet in his studio room. When they left for London, they didn’t get their security deposit back and had to pay an extra fee to get (what Phil was told was) green and purple paint out of the carpet. Phil had just rolled his eyes fondly and made sure it came out of Dan’s personal bank account. 

At Dan’s first big gallery show in London, Phil was stood alone looking at one of the paintings when a man came up beside him and started talking to him about the colors in the painting, asking Phil’s opinion on what they might symbolize. Phil had to stifle a laugh and spouted off some kind of pretentious bullshit he knew Dan would love, ending it with a quick, “oh, and I’m completely colorblind by the way.” 

Even still, near on a decade later, Phil still found he could be fascinated by this man, this incredible artist who’d stolen his heart from the moment they’d met. He still loved to watch Dan wander around the art store, and still could sit on the floor of Dan’s studio room all day watching him paint and not get bored. He loved Dan for everything he was, and for everything that Dan did for him. Every now and then, he felt these pangs of sadness for what he wasn’t seeing in Dan’s beautiful paintings, but then he’d remember watching Dan pour over the colors and covered in paint up to his elbows and with a streak of paint smeared on his face, and he knew he had a different perspective on Dan’s paintings than everyone else did. 

So when Dan came up to Phil at the computer one lazy Sunday morning with Phil’s nice camera in his hands, he knew Dan was up to something. Dan rarely liked to be in Phil’s videos, preferring to keep himself out of the spotlight as much as possible. Phil adjusted his glasses and smiled at Dan, looking between the lens of the camera and Dan’s eyes. “I want you to help me with a painting,” Dan said, a playful smirk on his face. 

“You want my help with a painting?” Phil asked, returning the smirk. “Okay, I’ll bite, what do you need my help with?” 

Dan’s smirk turned into a full blown smile then. “I want your help with the colors.” 

Phil rolled his eyes. “How can I help with the colors? I’m colorblind, Dan.”

“I know, I want you to pick out the colors for me and then I’ll paint with them based on what you choose.” Dan reached into the pocket of his paint stained sweatpants and pulled a pair of glasses out of them. “I found these glasses online that help people who are colorblind see colors. Something about the rods and cones in your eyes, I don’t know. I’m an artist not a scientist. When I’m done with the painting, I want you to put these on and see the colors in the painting,” he said, handing the glasses to Phil. He held them gently and looked up at his boyfriend, his own smirk growing wider as well. “So yay or nay?” 

“I think this is either a fantastic idea in the making or a terrible one, but I’ll still play along because I love seeing you excited.”

Once they’d gotten to the art store, Dan gave Phil his marching orders. “Okay, I’ve written down the brands that I like so you can pick from those ones. I don’t need black or white, I’ve already got plenty of both. I also have a metric fuckton of yellow for some reason so I don’t need any more yellow, either. Pick out let’s say...ten, that sounds like a good number.”

“What about brushes?” Phil asked, looking over the list Dan had written out. “Your current ones are pretty ratty because you leave them in the kitchen sink all the time.” 

“Only the cheap ones, the nice ones my mum and dad got me for my birthday are still perfectly new, thank you very much,” Dan quipped only half seriously. 

“Because they gave them to you literally a week ago,” Phil said back, and Dan met his eyes with a joking angry look that melted away almost instantly, a smile forming in its place. 

“On that note, I’m going to go get a canvas stretched at the back. Have fun,” Dan said with that same smile on his face, pressing a quick kiss against Phil’s cheek before dashing away, leaving Phil in the aisle of paints that seemed to go on forever. 

Phil was grateful in that moment for the crutch his vlogging camera provided because he had absolutely no idea where to start. “Dan said to pick out ten colors, so let’s just go for it I guess,” Phil said, picking up the tube of paint closest to him. “They have the names on them but no swatches, is that a good thing or a bad thing? We’ll find out soon enough.” The name of the one he’d picked up sounded interesting, it said was some kind of teal, so he put it into the basket Dan had gotten at the front of the store and continued on his journey. Phil had no frame of reference for any of the colors he’d picked up, he mostly just picked them based on the sound of the names. Now he could see why Dan took so long to pick colors, because there were so many of them to choose from. There had to be at least a hundred different shades of each color in that one aisle, and it made Phil’s head spin slightly. Eventually, he’d picked out the ten colors for Dan and met him at the till to pay for the paints and the canvas. 

When they’d gotten home and Phil had set up his nice camera on a tripod to film Dan painting, Dan insisted that Phil leave him be instead of watching him paint like usual. “I want it to be a surprise this time,” Dan said, shoving Phil out of his studio room. 

“Can I sit on the floor right out here?” Phil asked with that same goofy smile that had made Dan’s heart jump the first time he’d seen it. 

“Sure, whatever, just no peeking.” Phil giggled to himself slightly, always amused at how easy it was to break Dan’s resolve if he wanted to. A few minutes pass as Phil works on making a dent in his email inbox when he hears Dan’s lilting laugh through the open door. “You really backed me into a corner here, Phil,” Dan calls out to Phil who feels a smile spread across his face.

“Not my fault, I had no idea what I was doing!” Phil could almost hear Dan roll his eyes at Phil’s response. 

After that, Dan was silent, and Phil had his headphones in as he caught up on the emails he’d missed when he and Dan had gone away to visit Dan’s family for his birthday. Suddenly it was nearing midnight and Dan was crouching behind Phil’s computer screen, paint smeared in his hair and a wide smile on his face. “I’m done,” he announced, moving Phil’s laptop off his crossed legs. “You ready?” 

“As I’ll ever be I guess,” Phil said, a swell of anxiety filling his stomach. A million what ifs were filling his head as he stood up and as Dan put his hands over Phil’s eyes. Dan’s presence behind him helped him relax as he gently lead him into the studio room. Goosebumps rose on Phil’s skin as they walked in, from the air conditioner Dan had in the window or the anticipation, Phil wasn’t sure. 

“Okay, keep your eyes closed for a second,” Dan murmured in Phil’s ear, stepping away to grab something before Phil felt Dan slide the glasses on his face. “Open your eyes on three. One, two, three.” When Phil opened his eyes, Dan was standing in front of him with a big gorgeous smile on his face. 

Phil had always thought that Dan was the most beautiful man in the world, but seeing his face in something other than muted grey for the first time took his breath away. His eyes were a deep dark brown that matched his hair, just as Dan had described, and his skin was more tanned than Phil had thought it would be. He couldn’t help himself when tears started to well up in his eyes, and he reached out to delicately take Dan’s face in his hands. “I take it they’re working?” Dan asked quietly, wiping the tears away from Phil’s eyes. Phil nodded, looking at the room all around them, until Dan stepped aside to reveal the painting. 

At first glance, it looked like one of Dan’s typical paintings, abstract and ever changing, but then Phil saw the thick lines that separated the swirls of color to make it an abstract portrait of Phil. “Is that me?” Phil asked in disbelief, moving closer to the painting and crouching down in front of it. Phil could barely get a word out, sitting down in front of the painting and wiping the tears that wouldn’t stop falling off his face. “Dan, this is nothing like I ever imagined. I used to lay there and think about what colors might look like but- but this....” he let his sentence drop off, at a loss for words. 

“Now these two right here are called contrasting colors,” Dan said quietly after a moment of silence as he sat next to Phil, pointing at a small section of the painting. “And these ones are called split complementary colors.” Dan went on to explain how Phil somehow had picked out colors that worked perfectly together according to the color theory Dan had learned in university. They stayed like that for who knows how long, Phil wanting to know everything there was to know about the colors he’d picked out. After that day, Phil wore the glasses more often than not, wanting to see the world in vivid color rather than the muted grey he was so used to. It was a new experience for him, and something he never thought he’d get to see in his lifetime. Just like the contrasting colors Dan had showed Phil, everything had fallen into place when he’d met Dan. 

Dan was Phil's whole world, and always would be, no matter if he was in color or in black and white.


End file.
